Its fascinating that electricity is really the biggest cost of computing. I put a server in my house which was supposed to save money, but actually the electricity cost was something I hadn't thought of and really adds up. esp when the AC has to run to remove the extra heat. So much old hardware out there but its going to get junked as new hw is more efficient.
Don't use a "server" server, unless you really need that. Use a desktop from a few years ago, from some oem who advertises power efficiency. Stuff it full of hdds and ram.
I've made very good experiences with Fujitsu. The power consumption figures they publish in their energy consumption white papers has been matching my measurements very well, so you can check ebay for used machines that match your performance/price expectations and then google eg "p920 energy white paper" and check the pdf. (Note, some models are available with different PSUs, ie 90+ and 85+.)
My "home server" mostly idles at 14W with one hdd running, one in standby and one ssd.
Take a look at the Tiny Mini Micro[1] project from Serve the Home for some very enthusiastic reviews of small 1 liter-sized desktop computers from Lenovo, Dell, and HP. I use a tiny Lenovo that's been rock solid, and uses almost no power.
This is the way. You don't need high density at home (usually) so don't pay the price for it. Get a mobo with ECC ram that fits an ATX case if you want server grade stuff. If you don't use stupid tech like VMware it won't eat your resources either (not that VMware is bad in a datacenter, but it is quite resource hungry in comparison to virt-manager or Proxmox).
I mean unless databases or Java are your favorite things in the world.
Configure power saving as well, that way your CPU really doesn't consume a lot.
Same conclusion here. Initially I used an old notebook with USB cases for full-size HDDs, nowadays it'n an older desktop PC in a midi tower, with some extra memory and HDDs. Idle power is <20W, which is most of the time. I really wanted a proper server for the cool factor, but it's just so expensive to maintain.
In Germany, my rule of thumb was that a constant 1W load is 1€/year. This year, I had to update it, it is now more something like 3€/year. The increase is so important I am still not sure if my calculations are right!
1W x 24h x 365 = 8760Wh
My current price: 0.33€/kWh (100% renewable)
8.76kWh x 0.33€/kWh = 2.89€
You don’t get 100% renewable in Germany. The mix is 50% renewables, the rest is nuclear, coal and natural gas.
With nuclear being phased out for ideological reasons and natural gas being scarse due to the war in Ukraine, Germany will soon burn more coal than ever.
New electricity contracts already go as high as 70 Cents/kWh thanks to the misguided energy policy in Germany.
I use $1 USD per watt per year, with electric prices around $0.10/kWh. Good enough to inform decisions like whether to leave a light on all the time ($5/year) or whether to purchase a NAS vs. used server ($40 vs. $300 per year).
I guess my prices are actually a little over $0.10 and a watt over a year is a little under 10,000Wh as shown in your calculations, so those offset to make the estimate even more accurate (than necessary).
It's like with refrigerators - when some years ago it was both cost-efficient and even 'green' to scrap working refrigerators and replace them with new ones, because the difference in improved energy efficiency meant that the electricity cost savings outweighed the cost of the new refrigerator already within a year or two and the reduced pollution from less electricity (at the time, fossil fuels) outweighed the environmental cost/waste of making that new refrigerator.
You obtain a reduction of (1726-400) * 0.15 ~= 200$ a year.
I believe the average refrigerator price in the USA is over 400$ so I can't understand where the 2 years figure would come from without even talking about trying to supposedly be "green" ...
And after 1988 you are down to 800kwh so you would gain something like 60$ a year.
There's a reason used servers are so cheap on ebay: if you run them 24/7 their electricity cost makes them unattractive compared to new hardware (often within a year).
Said in another comment, my server averages around 100-200W. It's equivalent to running a gaming PC.
The reason there's a lot of cheap servers on eBay is that their support contracts expired and are absolutely ridiculously expensive to maintain for a big company. It's easier to get a new server (which will likely have performance and efficiency upgrades as well) than to continue maintaining a server that no longer has a support contract.
The reason there's not many servers in people's hands is size and noise. Servers aren't meant to go in a house; most people don't have server racks in their home. And by default, the fans are jet engines, even behind closed doors.
They are still a great deal for burstable workloads or to use as a workstation - only run it when needed so no need to run 24/7.
If you need really cheap (and local!) compute for short periods of time, picking up one of those servers can still work out cheaper than renting from a cloud provider.
My R730 averages at around 100-200W with two 12-core CPUs, 128GB RAM and 8 12-14TB drives.
Servers are more efficient than people give them credit for. It's close to a gaming PC in electricity usage. Certainly not 60W (or what people can get with NUCs and RPi clusters) but for the power I get, it's very much worth it.
Well the electricity prices (according to the article) rose 55% in Germany and 83% in Finland, while the server prices are just going up by 10%, so electricity is just a part of it.
Electricity is a significant opex for many products including Agriculture. For example, I've seen Farmers cost as high as 50% for power, generally to move or pump water
I've been wondering over the past few months if we can build a "public" cloud. I have some old machines gathering dust, I'm sure others do too. Is it feasible to build an ad-hoc network of such computers where the compute power is rented out. For ex: I can connect my old lenovo i5 laptop to this network for 6hrs a day and charge 1.2x my electricy cost. Sort of like on demand EC2 instances, but backed by torrent like tech. It'd make computers pay for themselves over time
In order to keep my eletricity bill for a running system in my apartment to then minimum I researched the specs & prices from the "The Power Consumption Database"[1] and found an intel nuc running on 5watts idle. Thats the same class of power consumption of a raspi 4 8GB, but easier to maintain. Now I'm waiting for my a Coral TPU USB-Accelarator to keep the peak consumption down for some recognition tasks in homeassistant.
To be fair, Hetzner is notorious for pushing down prices for everything as far down as they can by any means necessary. So this most likely makes their price point more sensitive than many other providers to any cost increase. Here is a great walk-through of one of their data centres [1] and you will see how streamlined everything is down to the hardware components. Nearly nothing goes to waste.
For sure, and I agree, but that's underscoring my point.
The marginal cost of cloud computing isn't capex, it's opex. And of that opex, it's mostly electricity. We aren't paying for the hardware so much as we're paying for the cost of keeping it turned on and cool.
Hetzner has a data center in Finland as well. While the electricity price in Finland is going up, it is not going up as much as in Germany due to availability of nuclear power. If you want to use Hetzner services I recommend picking a location in Finland.
> The fact that electricity costs is the dominating cost of cloud computing
In the article, they say that electricity has gone from .29 to .45 euros, a 55% increase. If electricity was the dominating cost, seems like they would have raised the price way more than 10%.
Assuming that the 10% price raise is equal to the increase of the electricity cost, that implies that after the increase the cost of the electricity represents slightly more than 25% of the price (which must also include the profit, besides the other costs).
So the electricity is not really dominating the costs, but it might still be the largest component of the cost.
There is an estimate that Amazon has a 61% profit margin for cloud services. Hetzner must have a lower profit margin, but nonetheless the electricity could be as much as half of the costs.
It's been like that for a long time (not only for cloud computing, but any big IT infra). Power is everything. To a point, that you measure datacenters in megawatts, when you bring new HW to datacenters you most often talk about improvement in compute per watt, not absolute compute.
It's not only because of the cost of power, but also because power is something that's hard to increase in an existing datacenter - you can put in new servers easily, but putting new power lines and upgrading all the infrastructure is usually just too expensive.
ARM on desktop => ARM for development => ARM on servers => ARM on cloud.
Apple's multi-billion contracts with AWS are ending this or next year, Apple has their own power efficient systems and will compete with AWS, as they have to maintain/increase growth.
Or people will separate out heavy tasks that aren’t time critical to run them when power is abundant (when there’s wind or sun) and not when it’s scarce.
I wouldn't talk about "clouds" as being limited by energy prices, as though they're uniform. Hetzner is much, much cheaper than AWS/Azure/Google. There's a huge amount of fat/gross margin that could be cut from the pricing of the big ones.
gonna go out on a limb and say 0... made me look though and apparently it is starting to happen.
In March (2022), Fortum and Microsoft announced our joint plan for a ground-breaking data centre region in the Helsinki, Finland metropolitan area. The data centres will use 100% clean electricity and the waste heat they generate will be used to heat homes, as well as business and public premises in the area. I must say I am immensely proud of this project – but I believe it’s only the beginning.
Server pricing, potato pricing, I suppose every product has some energy component baked into the price. Probably more than I might even guess…
High electricity price, and high energy cost in general, is probably the biggest regressive tax that humans face.
Not just in direct energy and gas consumption, but in the baseline increases that flow through to all the essential goods that households purchase.
New energy generation technologies must not only be cleaner, but also more efficient. It is so crucially important to raising standards of living to ensure a reliable supply of cheap energy.
Love Hetzner great to see a hosting company thats being upfront and transparent about its prices.
So tired of hosting companies doing dodgy stuff with their pricing like giving you the first month 99% off but wording it like you will pay that month to month.
Maybe at least increasing energy costs will force people and companies to ditch Electron-based "programs" (or Java/NodeJS in case of servers). Native is much more energy efficient by definition.
No. Most people do end user computing (where the Electron-based apps run) on laptops, which, for battery size/weight/runtime purposes, are already power constrained.
The efforts are going into making browser engines and processors more efficient.
> Native is much more energy efficient by definition.
"much more" is not true. It may be much more efficient in some cases, but with modern runtimes for interpreted code for many operations it is very close to native performance.
I have a bunch of servers in an apartment I use as a secondary office space. Monthly electricity cost increased by 230%. It’s like that since January. Hetzner’s 10% seems too low, although the increase is calculated on the total price of the server, so I guess it could be sufficient. I won’t be surprised if they further increase their prices in the near future.
I currently pay less per month to Hetzner for a rented dedicated server (from the second hand "server auction" section) than I would pay in electricity alone if I ran the thing in my home. Yeah, electricity is quite expensive now in Germany and Europe. ^^
While I'm a fan of nuclear power myself, I don't think this is true. Nuclear is only good for base loads, current high prices are mostly driven by peak demand.
Wouldn't it be the case that the nuclear portion would be price stable, so any fluctuations in say the last 30% of power to reach peak power would be less severe in the final bill?
Well the green energy proponents (which we are now learning were on the payroll of Gazprom lobbyists) launched a FUD campaign against nuclear plants which were completely safe and working fine post-Fukushima.
This chess move by Putin is paying dividends because Germany is shifting towards populism/right wing as is the trend in Western Europe (can you really blame Parisians?) and realizing it can't replace Russian gas without incurring serious internal turmoil and economic ruin.
Now we are seeing this impact everything. Even hetzner isn't safe.
Gas and oil use for electricity is very low. Electricity is over 85% renewable and nuclear with most of the rest coming as industrial or district heating by products
District heating is quite often coal or oil for now but quickly changing to non carbon forms.
Germany on the other hand bet heavily into gas (and mostly as pipelines to Russia without building any LNG terminals of their own for redundancy) while trying to change over to renewables. Now gas is very expensive and the change over is not finished yet so they have to burn expensive gas and keep their old coal plants running (very expensive in terms of co2 credits)
edit: Electricity is really expensive now in Europe in general due to sanctions on Russia (and their retaliation cuts). Hopefully the new Olkiluoto 3 reactor goes into full production mode before winter to help a bit (it is running at partial power during testing at the moment)
The problem is called Merit-Price-Fixation and is the method used all over Europe to "define" the costs for energy. It is also called Windfall earnings.
I heard that in Austria it is under discussion that this method is not well suited for price fixation. I also heard the first tones here in Germany.
- They wanted to be super green so lets go with sun and wind
- But, hey sun and wind are not reliable (not talking about some problems that the grid is not very good prepared to handle the peaks), especially not in winter
- Let's use gas to cover that, Russia is so friendly country, and its all about business, what kind of maniac would stop natural gas, when we pay billions for it
- Hmm, well there is 'a country' that is using natural gas to do politics, but hey, they got Crimea now, what would they want more, when we are still paying that billions to them. Let's build another gas pipe, and pretend nothing can go wrong, while ignoring that negativistic east-european countries preparing for worst case scenario
- And, what about shutting down that completely functional nuclear power plants ? We want to be green, lets do that.
- Oops, our lovely natural gas supplier attacked another country
- Oops, our natural gas power plants are somehow costly to run now, lets burn some coal
- Oops, coal is also getting a bit expensive
- Oops, our not very friendly natural gas supplier, occasionally stops natural gas now
- Ooops, our natural gas reservoirs will be not full before winter
> They wanted to be super green so lets go with sun and wind
This is a complete mischaracterization of why Germany invested so much into renewables. Like... 20 years ago? Germany saw the writing on the wall when it comes to how they were getting their energy which at the time was mostly coming from coal. They didn't want to go Nuclear for whatever reason so that left renewables and natural gas which wasn't preferred but it was still significantly better.
They didn't do it just to "be super green". They did it because coal is all around bad and wasn't the future that Germany wanted--and they were right. They absolutely made the right decision back then and investments by the German government are a big reason why solar is the cheapest form of energy right now (thanks Germany!).
If anything they didn't invest enough in renewables. They obviously didn't expect the effects of global warming to come this quickly. A big reason why electricity is so expensive is because the rivers in France that supply water to their nuclear reactors dried up. I mean, how do you predict something like that happening even 10 years ago? Even if that was a possibility included in some climate change report how seriously would politicians take such a prediction?
The instantaneous market price that everyone pays is the marginal cost of the most expensive power source currently online.
For nearly every country worldwide, that is gas turbines most of the time. Even if 90% of power generation is coming from solar, it's the 10% gas that sets the price (since the marginal cost of installed solar is near zero).
Gas prices in Europe vary by region, but are pretty much determined by gas transport capacities to Germany. Ie. Germany has the highest prices because of government mandates to fill storage. Any place with good gas transport links also has high prices. Places with few/no pipelines to Germany and an independent supply have low prices.
And that is why Germany is twice Finland (Finland gets gas from Norway, and neither has big pipelines to Germany).
> (Finland gets gas from Norway, and neither has big pipelines to Germany).
Not really. Finland used to get gas from Russia but now it is mostly from a pipeline through Estonia to Latvia where it arrives in ships from wherever happens to be the cheapest (we are in process of building the first LNG terminal in Finland). Could be Norway but can also be USA, middle east, etc
Finland just doesn't use much gas for electricity. What we use mostly goes into industrial processes. We do have a couple gas peaker plants but those are only used in the winter if needed. Actual load balancing happens through hydro (and imports from Norway/Sweden but that is also mostly hydro)
Not really. That’s the theoretical microeconomics approach if all kWh were “rebid” instantaneously. In fact, wholesale distributors can dampen the cost by diversifying in time (with contracts), location (by distribution) and cost (different plants).
In north Norway the electricity costs:
0.75 c/kWh
In south Norway the electricity costs:
307.00 c/kWh
In Latvia it costs:
1,240.00 c/kWh
It is like that every day everywhere in Europe. In Finland the transfer line to Estonia means a lot to our local prices. If we cannot get that line fully utilised (in normal non-windy day, and I bet producers want it to stay around 99%), it means that prices are fixed to Estonia (which you can see in that picture). If we get the line fully loaded, Finland divides to its own market and prices drop considerably.
In Norway and Sweden you can see multiple prices inside a country. It is because their internal lines are not sturdy enough to transfer enough electricity to south (in nordics it is common that electricity is made at north (e.g. a lot of rivers), but needed at south). The random energy (wind) has made this quite crazy. On windy days, the electricity price can even be negative. But wind energy is not reliable at all. But nobody builds or wants to run anything else as wind is easily the cheapest on windy days, and it is not that easy to always start and stop other facilities, which operate with losses on windy days. In general Germany jumped to a dwell, and everyone followed, and now we are where we are.
It's not that the energy is made in in the northern parts of Norway. Most energy is from the south west of Norway, but the southern parts of Norway has connections to other parts of Europe and is affected by the energy crisis in Europe.
But the part about capacity internally is true, so the average price in northern Norway today is 0.00061 EUR/kWh(yes, you read that correctly) while it's 0.35 EUR/kWh in the south. That's 574 times as expensive!
Norway is making a ton of money on energy export now.
Finland has a lot of nuclear and hydro, which are stable sources. Hydro can get dirt cheap since production is basically constant even if demand is low.
> Germany shut down all their nuclear plants about 10 years ago...
"Nuclear power in Germany accounted for 13.3% of German electricity supply in 2021, generated by six power plants, of which three were switched off at the end of 2021, the other three due to cease operation at the end of 2022 according to the complete nuclear phase-out plan of 2011." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany
Not that I know of. We still have 3 nuclear stations in production. One of them is Isar 2 next to Munich. They will stay in operation until the end of this year.
That said, there are debates right now to prolong their operation until another few years. But that has other constraints.
Only 0.2% of the electricity is generated from oil in Finland. But Finland produces a good quarter of its electricity from nuclear power. Maybe that makes a difference?
Readit News
I've made very good experiences with Fujitsu. The power consumption figures they publish in their energy consumption white papers has been matching my measurements very well, so you can check ebay for used machines that match your performance/price expectations and then google eg "p920 energy white paper" and check the pdf. (Note, some models are available with different PSUs, ie 90+ and 85+.)
My "home server" mostly idles at 14W with one hdd running, one in standby and one ssd.
[1] https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...
I mean unless databases or Java are your favorite things in the world.
Configure power saving as well, that way your CPU really doesn't consume a lot.
With nuclear being phased out for ideological reasons and natural gas being scarse due to the war in Ukraine, Germany will soon burn more coal than ever.
New electricity contracts already go as high as 70 Cents/kWh thanks to the misguided energy policy in Germany.
I guess my prices are actually a little over $0.10 and a watt over a year is a little under 10,000Wh as shown in your calculations, so those offset to make the estimate even more accurate (than necessary).
https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/Dayahead/Area-...
Just for my curiosity though, Where did your 1Eur come from? The prices were >20ct for 10 years now. Or do you calculate without taxes and stuff?
From what I can find even in extreme case it's not true. Even with a fridge from 1972 which averaged 1726kw/h (Source: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.energy.27....) to a more recent one which will probably be around 400kwh. And with the kwh at 0.15$ (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610).
You obtain a reduction of (1726-400) * 0.15 ~= 200$ a year.
I believe the average refrigerator price in the USA is over 400$ so I can't understand where the 2 years figure would come from without even talking about trying to supposedly be "green" ... And after 1988 you are down to 800kwh so you would gain something like 60$ a year.
Said in another comment, my server averages around 100-200W. It's equivalent to running a gaming PC.
The reason there's a lot of cheap servers on eBay is that their support contracts expired and are absolutely ridiculously expensive to maintain for a big company. It's easier to get a new server (which will likely have performance and efficiency upgrades as well) than to continue maintaining a server that no longer has a support contract.
The reason there's not many servers in people's hands is size and noise. Servers aren't meant to go in a house; most people don't have server racks in their home. And by default, the fans are jet engines, even behind closed doors.
If you need really cheap (and local!) compute for short periods of time, picking up one of those servers can still work out cheaper than renting from a cloud provider.
Asrock Rack c246 WSI (Mini ITX workstation board) 32GB DDR4 ECC Udimms (16GB x2) Core i3 9100T (25w, low power 4 core part, supports ECC, and quicksync) 6 IronWolf 4TB NAS drives
The 6 drives are in RaidZ2 so give 16TB usable space, and at full pelt the max power consumption is 60W for everything.
Servers are more efficient than people give them credit for. It's close to a gaming PC in electricity usage. Certainly not 60W (or what people can get with NUCs and RPi clusters) but for the power I get, it's very much worth it.
[1]http://www.tpcdb.com/list.php?type=13
The fact that electricity costs is the dominating (edit, correction: marginal) cost of cloud computing basically means that:
1) We're up against physical barriers to lowering the cost (and ecological impact) of our clouds.
2) Optimizing for less compute will pay multi-fold dividends over the next few years where we can expect energy prices to continue rising.
3) Building more power-efficient chips is a big deal, and I'm glad to see more general ARM deployment, given their efficiency gains.
[1]: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM
I would expect "famous", since this seems lika a feat/achievement to me.
The marginal cost of cloud computing isn't capex, it's opex. And of that opex, it's mostly electricity. We aren't paying for the hardware so much as we're paying for the cost of keeping it turned on and cool.
In the article, they say that electricity has gone from .29 to .45 euros, a 55% increase. If electricity was the dominating cost, seems like they would have raised the price way more than 10%.
So the electricity is not really dominating the costs, but it might still be the largest component of the cost.
There is an estimate that Amazon has a 61% profit margin for cloud services. Hetzner must have a lower profit margin, but nonetheless the electricity could be as much as half of the costs.
Where are you pulling seeing the price change %? I may need to edit that to marginal, if it's only 10%. :)
It's not only because of the cost of power, but also because power is something that's hard to increase in an existing datacenter - you can put in new servers easily, but putting new power lines and upgrading all the infrastructure is usually just too expensive.
Apple's multi-billion contracts with AWS are ending this or next year, Apple has their own power efficient systems and will compete with AWS, as they have to maintain/increase growth.
Are you saying Apple is going to roll out an AWS competitor to the public? I find that highly unlikely.
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252481957/Google-creates...
I suspect this is already happening in places like Google and paying significant dividends given the scale of code replication.
In March (2022), Fortum and Microsoft announced our joint plan for a ground-breaking data centre region in the Helsinki, Finland metropolitan area. The data centres will use 100% clean electricity and the waste heat they generate will be used to heat homes, as well as business and public premises in the area. I must say I am immensely proud of this project – but I believe it’s only the beginning.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/london_electricity_su...
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High electricity price, and high energy cost in general, is probably the biggest regressive tax that humans face.
Not just in direct energy and gas consumption, but in the baseline increases that flow through to all the essential goods that households purchase.
New energy generation technologies must not only be cleaner, but also more efficient. It is so crucially important to raising standards of living to ensure a reliable supply of cheap energy.
So tired of hosting companies doing dodgy stuff with their pricing like giving you the first month 99% off but wording it like you will pay that month to month.
Electricity pricing is insane and will only get worse. I doubt AWS will operate a whole region at a loss.
The efforts are going into making browser engines and processors more efficient.
> Native is much more energy efficient by definition.
"much more" is not true. It may be much more efficient in some cases, but with modern runtimes for interpreted code for many operations it is very close to native performance.
This chess move by Putin is paying dividends because Germany is shifting towards populism/right wing as is the trend in Western Europe (can you really blame Parisians?) and realizing it can't replace Russian gas without incurring serious internal turmoil and economic ruin.
Now we are seeing this impact everything. Even hetzner isn't safe.
I doubt Germans have twice the purchasing power as Finns.
District heating is quite often coal or oil for now but quickly changing to non carbon forms.
Here is a real time view of the electricity market in Finland https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/
Germany on the other hand bet heavily into gas (and mostly as pipelines to Russia without building any LNG terminals of their own for redundancy) while trying to change over to renewables. Now gas is very expensive and the change over is not finished yet so they have to burn expensive gas and keep their old coal plants running (very expensive in terms of co2 credits)
edit: Electricity is really expensive now in Europe in general due to sanctions on Russia (and their retaliation cuts). Hopefully the new Olkiluoto 3 reactor goes into full production mode before winter to help a bit (it is running at partial power during testing at the moment)
I heard that in Austria it is under discussion that this method is not well suited for price fixation. I also heard the first tones here in Germany.
But there is more:
- They wanted to be super green so lets go with sun and wind
- But, hey sun and wind are not reliable (not talking about some problems that the grid is not very good prepared to handle the peaks), especially not in winter
- Let's use gas to cover that, Russia is so friendly country, and its all about business, what kind of maniac would stop natural gas, when we pay billions for it
- Hmm, well there is 'a country' that is using natural gas to do politics, but hey, they got Crimea now, what would they want more, when we are still paying that billions to them. Let's build another gas pipe, and pretend nothing can go wrong, while ignoring that negativistic east-european countries preparing for worst case scenario
- And, what about shutting down that completely functional nuclear power plants ? We want to be green, lets do that.
- Oops, our lovely natural gas supplier attacked another country
- Oops, our natural gas power plants are somehow costly to run now, lets burn some coal
- Oops, coal is also getting a bit expensive
- Oops, our not very friendly natural gas supplier, occasionally stops natural gas now
- Ooops, our natural gas reservoirs will be not full before winter
- Oooops, winter is coming...
This is a complete mischaracterization of why Germany invested so much into renewables. Like... 20 years ago? Germany saw the writing on the wall when it comes to how they were getting their energy which at the time was mostly coming from coal. They didn't want to go Nuclear for whatever reason so that left renewables and natural gas which wasn't preferred but it was still significantly better.
They didn't do it just to "be super green". They did it because coal is all around bad and wasn't the future that Germany wanted--and they were right. They absolutely made the right decision back then and investments by the German government are a big reason why solar is the cheapest form of energy right now (thanks Germany!).
If anything they didn't invest enough in renewables. They obviously didn't expect the effects of global warming to come this quickly. A big reason why electricity is so expensive is because the rivers in France that supply water to their nuclear reactors dried up. I mean, how do you predict something like that happening even 10 years ago? Even if that was a possibility included in some climate change report how seriously would politicians take such a prediction?
For nearly every country worldwide, that is gas turbines most of the time. Even if 90% of power generation is coming from solar, it's the 10% gas that sets the price (since the marginal cost of installed solar is near zero).
Gas prices in Europe vary by region, but are pretty much determined by gas transport capacities to Germany. Ie. Germany has the highest prices because of government mandates to fill storage. Any place with good gas transport links also has high prices. Places with few/no pipelines to Germany and an independent supply have low prices.
And that is why Germany is twice Finland (Finland gets gas from Norway, and neither has big pipelines to Germany).
Not really. Finland used to get gas from Russia but now it is mostly from a pipeline through Estonia to Latvia where it arrives in ships from wherever happens to be the cheapest (we are in process of building the first LNG terminal in Finland). Could be Norway but can also be USA, middle east, etc
Finland just doesn't use much gas for electricity. What we use mostly goes into industrial processes. We do have a couple gas peaker plants but those are only used in the winter if needed. Actual load balancing happens through hydro (and imports from Norway/Sweden but that is also mostly hydro)
In north Norway the electricity costs: 0.75 c/kWh In south Norway the electricity costs: 307.00 c/kWh In Latvia it costs: 1,240.00 c/kWh
It is like that every day everywhere in Europe. In Finland the transfer line to Estonia means a lot to our local prices. If we cannot get that line fully utilised (in normal non-windy day, and I bet producers want it to stay around 99%), it means that prices are fixed to Estonia (which you can see in that picture). If we get the line fully loaded, Finland divides to its own market and prices drop considerably.
In Norway and Sweden you can see multiple prices inside a country. It is because their internal lines are not sturdy enough to transfer enough electricity to south (in nordics it is common that electricity is made at north (e.g. a lot of rivers), but needed at south). The random energy (wind) has made this quite crazy. On windy days, the electricity price can even be negative. But wind energy is not reliable at all. But nobody builds or wants to run anything else as wind is easily the cheapest on windy days, and it is not that easy to always start and stop other facilities, which operate with losses on windy days. In general Germany jumped to a dwell, and everyone followed, and now we are where we are.
But the part about capacity internally is true, so the average price in northern Norway today is 0.00061 EUR/kWh(yes, you read that correctly) while it's 0.35 EUR/kWh in the south. That's 574 times as expensive!
Norway is making a ton of money on energy export now.
Note that this is particular price point today (11.08.2022) at 12 - 13. Record was some other day for 2100 c/kWh.
However at particular moment, you can get 27 c/kWh fixed price contract. (last year it was 6 c/kWh)
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromsteuergesetz_(Deutschland...
I don't know if Finland has something equivalent or not.
Finland invested in nuclear and is bringing their latest plant online this fall.
It doesn't take a genius to see which one would be hit harder by sanctions on Russian gas.
"Nuclear power in Germany accounted for 13.3% of German electricity supply in 2021, generated by six power plants, of which three were switched off at the end of 2021, the other three due to cease operation at the end of 2022 according to the complete nuclear phase-out plan of 2011." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany
How exactly has a not yet operating reactor that is vastly over budget and time any influence on the current price though?
That said, there are debates right now to prolong their operation until another few years. But that has other constraints.